The fact that the United States can print unlimited amounts of money and borrow trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.
I think any country that borrowed 14 trillion dollars would be wealthy, just as if the United States had to pay back 15 trillion dollars it would no longer be wealthy .
Ok, quick question. Why don’t you go out and borrow a billion dollars and become wealthy yourself?
-XT
I’l take the polar opposite view. The south, which had slavery, was in fact the worst developed part of the country economically, even before the Civil War.
One major factor was the ***shortage ***of people. There were never enough workers to go around despite frequent influx of immigrants, and every employer had to compete with free farmland a thousand miles west. This led to an industrialization that valued innovaton and mechanization over brute force manual labour.
Plus, a freer, less rigid social structure - the “American Dream” was no pipe dream. People could do what they want, build what they want, sell what they wanted, while much of Europe was still tied up with guild laws, licensing, and similar commercial restrictions.
The alternative road to wealth - look at the countries that have excelled - Taiwan, Japan, S.Korea, China. As long as the leadership was for whatever reason commited to modernization and allowing commercial growth, things have worked for them.
Here are my reasons, in order of importance:
As the OP points out, China is #2.
I would say it depends on what infrastructure you’re talking about and compared to what. Something that often gets lost when comparing Russia, Canada, or Australia to the United States is we have relatively significant people who live throughout the entire country. Even North Dakota has some “real” cities, and there are interstates highways serving all fifty states (although obviously the interstate in Hawaii doesn’t leave the islands ;).)
Even in very rural states it’s gotten rare to see unpaved roads these days, at least roads that aren’t exclusively used by hunters, farmers, ranchers or etc or private paths.
What other country in the world, of our size, has such a large road system as the interstate highway system that is being constantly maintained every where it exists?
I won’t argue that hyper-settled countries like the European microstates don’t have better road coverage, but they also could fit many times over into an average American state.
Our railroad system is also quite good, but people often forget this because it is only really good for freight (Amtrak sucks throughout most of the country, with the exception of a few lines that are fast and well run.)
Only in terms of raw GDP, GDP per capita (a measure of actual wealth for a population of people) China ranks abysmally low. 128th in the world, and it is in the same tier as Turkmenistan, Ecuador, and Albania in that measure (and out ranked by Brazil, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Russia, and Belize.)
Well yeah, when you count all the slaves. Perhaps in counting them for purposes of GDP we could come to some kind of… compromise.
I vaguely recall it having something to do with firearms, microbes and carbon-iron alloys.
Quick! figure out how to make that same point over and over and over and over again, teasing it out to 300 pages, and you too can have a best seller.
Or we could just admit that the slavery point was stupid and not really relevant to the discussion. The question is why is America rich relative to China, if it’s your argument that both China and America was built on the back of slaves, then why is America richer than China? If your argument is they are both “EVIL SLAVE PROFITEERING COUNTRIES” then you agree that for the purpose of comparing the two countries slavery is irrelevant, since it isn’t a difference. One would assume if you have two countries that did the same thing (profit from slaves) yet one is far richer than the other, there must be something else going on that made the richer country richer, since the slavery issue is a “push.”
Obviously I think the whole slavery point was plain wrong, but there’s really no reason to argue it because even in the context of your wrongheadedness logic demands you look at other reasons for the wealth discrepancy between China and the United States.
No slaves were counted in calculating either the US or China’s per capita GDP standing.
I’m going to give a list of reasons:
Wealth is currently measured in dollars. The US is the only legal source of dollars.
The US enforces debts according to a relatively non-corrupt set of laws that highly values property rights. This include debts owed by the US.
No slave labor. Slave labor ruins an economy. Read DeToqueville’s Democracy In America where he observes poverty in slave states on one side of a river and productivity on the other.
Vast resources internally that were given to companies willing to exploit them.
Two oceans and two neighbors unwilling to cause trouble. Long term physical security of the state is better than any country in history so people are willing to invest.
Heavy industrialization through two world wars where US acted as armorer for the winning side while not having its industry obliterated like everyone else.
Yeah? Cause:
It sure sounds like it’s still going on. I mean, we can stick our heads in the sand all day if you want… plus it’s not like all those factory workers making a dollar or two a day are anything other than slaves but in name.
Nah. It’s absolutely ludicrous to assume that because slavery existed in more than one place, and the ultimate fates of those people (who were the enslavers) weren’t exactly the same, that it has no relevance to anything whatsoever. Obviously, there are myriad factors that determine the wealth of a nation. But to pretend like our long, proud tradition (which continues in full force to this day) of exploiting the shit out of poor, mostly brown people has absolutely no bearing on why we are rich and they remain poor and it’s really all about these lofty concepts of “freedom” and “independence”… yeah, keep telling yourselves that.
You might like this, which is a discussion and display of a similar graph of personal income on a logarithmic scale vs. life expectancy.
Probally true, except for freight railroads.
The US freight railroad system is without a doubt the best in the world. It is very well mantained, quite innovative, highly efficient, and very modern. European railroad officials come to the US so they can try to emulate our system.
Not sure I understand this one. Would the per capita GDP figures be markedly different if measured in yuan?
But the basic problem with your point remains. If use of slavery is the factor is our wealth, why isn’t it in China’s wealth? When I brought this up, you rebutted it by pointing out that China’s GDP is large, but I countered this point by observing that you were not using per capita GDP; if you do, the US outstrips China considerably.
Since both countries used slave labor, and indeed China used it before the US did and ended the practice after the US did, how can you claim the reason for our wealth is slavery?
Isn’t the fact that the US is the worlds reserve currency a huge bonus?
Quote; Isn’t the fact that the US is the worlds reserve currency a huge bonus?
I should think it might be the other way around: the world uses the US currency as its reserve because the US has one of the more large and stable currencies. If that currency were to become seriously unreliable, and another currency become more large and stable, surely “the world” would switch.